Doseone

It's difficult to keep up with Doseone: He jumps from confident to neurotic, obscure to lucid, eschewing linear thought but dissecting a marketing plan with the confidence of a former business student. The emcee, poet, and breathtaking performer who was born Adam Drucker is best known as a founding member of Anticon, and from the bands cLOUDDEAD (with Why? and Odd Nosdam), Themselves (with Jel), and now the six-piece band Subtle. His other recent projects include the 13 & God album, a collaboration with German indietronica stars Notwist. Doseone recently spoke with us over the phone to talk about his work, his recent move to Vancouver, his dreams, and the story about that time he battled Eminem at the Scribblejam.

(Note: This interview took place before the start of Subtle's planned U.S. and European tour. At the beginning of that tour, the band suffered a road accident that left keyboardist Dax Pierson seriously injured. Our thoughts are with the band and Dax and we wish him a speedy recovery.)

Doseone: Hi Chris, it's nice to meet you on the phone. I live in Vancouver now, in Canada, and my cell phone service here talks to my speakers before it rings my phone. So the monitors in my studio go GUH-DA-GUH-DA-GUH-DA-GUH and then the phone rings.

Pitchfork Media: Oh, because the electrical signal...

D: I don't know what it is. Something in the speaker picks up the radio waves.

PFM: You live in Vancouver now? How long have you been there?

D: I've been here about two months. I have my girlfriend [who's Canadian], we've been together for two years, [but] they won't let you move anywhere with respect to the powers that be for a "love that doesn't exist." So I basically got some immigration lawyers, and I got a temporary work permit for two years. I moved up here in December.

PFM: And you moved up to be with her, not because of the election or anything like that?

D: No no no, it doesn't affect me in that scope. But it is nice. Everyone's jealous of me, all the people who remain tied to politics are all like, "No way! You did it!"

But it's great though, it's a fabulous move. And then I commute to be with the band, so actually I leave Monday to get read for tour, with the boys [in Subtle], down in the [San Francisco] Bay. And that's the skimma.

PFM: How do you like working with a live band?

D: I'm extremely happy with Subtle, it's really everything I would want out of music, as far as the climate between us and the spaces we fill, the way we're cutting songs now is more in the right vein than I ever knew I'd get...I'm not musically trained and I'm not all these other things. I'm creative with a keyboard and a drum machine, but I can't really make these perfect minimal musical executions-- all the things that would be nice with all these refined poems. But with Subtle, the six of us really are getting better at pulling things out of thin air, [and] working in that grey area where it's nice enough to feel led by a higher creative power. Jesus. The Jesus of ProTools.

Making music by yourself-- I don't know, some people do that shit, they love it and they eat it up. I'm not really into it. I personally have like a delicate balance of go-get-'em neurosis and security and insecurity. I'm not the kind of artist that wants to get a sound, refine it, and do it 'til I'm 50 so that it's the purest amber of my one way...

PFM: You like to have people to bounce stuff off of, or that change your direction?

D: I change my direction, I can't even help it. It's sort of like the fortune and misfortune of being a rapper. That was how I got into music and art was being a battle kid from Jersey, so I didn't have these wonderful ways of learning commitment, dedication, practicing skill. So sometimes that impairs me. But for the most part, it really allows me to be like, "Oh, I want to try something that sounds like a country song!" And I try it once my way, and that's that. And it doesn't pain me to no end that I couldn't slip into the cover of country...I'm definitely a garbage picker, as far as what I choose to steal to patch my aesthetic together, whether it's lines, or the Microphones' drums-- all the things that are beautiful in the world.

That's the thing about Subtle, is that when we meet, we don't hold a large amount of pressures over us to cover extra bases, you know? Especially for Jel and I, it's really healthy, because we've always had to be like, "Oh, now we gotta find the fucking timpani drums record." I mean you can always find the sample that covers what you're hearing, but barely...it allows me to really concentrate on words.

It's like we mentioned for a split second before-- coming up with it all yourself, sometimes that's what it's all about, but there are times when it just holds back something that is a composite work, when you have to find every piece. Sometimes you include someone, it ruins it. But you know like, we're getting to this space now where we all own "me," ha ha, the dotted line around where the song will be, we're all feeling good about leaving two people on the song or having all six of us. But it really frees me up and it makes me feel like a lead singer.

When we were working on 13 & God, me and Markus Acher, we both had this moment where we were looking at each other and so glad that we were both there. Because usually he's the guy that listens to every song and is like, "Fuck, this needs some thing that it doesn't have, to make it have the thing that it has that separates it from everything else," and we both were doing that for all the 13 & God songs, constantly, and we had this moment at the end where we were like, "Wow, this is great!"

And that's what Why? and I have, what Jel and I have, and now with Subtle we have this even more complex six-person thing going on where we multitask the melodies and I do the words...

PFM: Subtle basically practiced in a bedroom for three years, right?

D: Right, something ridiculous like that. We were a band that played Tuesday and Thursday like kids almost, in high school. Because we didn't want to rush what our sound would be. Six people is a lot of people to be like, [yokel voice] "We're this kind of band!"

PFM: It sounded like when you went in, you didn't have a template like, "we're an improv band, we're a hip-hop band." Which seemed challenging, because you're all sitting there in a room, looking at each other.

D: At best doing art you feel like you're led by something that doesn't involve you. And it's nice when you get the attraction, although the downside can be six people staring at each other blankly? The total attraction is, "Holy shit, this is just enough people to make some amazing music noone ever saw coming!" Everything set it up to have a nice sort of concentration, and the ability to learn how to talk too much and play too little, or play too much and talk too little. So that we never will be a band that gets in a garage and goes, "ONE! TWO! ONE TWO THREE FOUR!" Or is in the studio with a producer, going, [British Spinal Tap accent] "You know, what should I play?"

PFM: When you released the Season EPs [four records of the band's early work], they were a work in progress. But was it weird to read the fan response to that? Or did you pay any attention?

D: Well the Winter one [a 37 minute ambient improv work] was hysterical, dude. Because we have, I mean, God bless 'em all, unGod bless 'em all, I love our die-hard rap fans, from the raw rap and battle days. But those dudes, they're the ones who really don't know what I look like, they assume I'm like 7'3" and Puerto Rican, you know what I'm saying? Or a goblin, a Puerto Rican goblin or something. So they come up and they do this whole, [b-boy voice] "Yeah man, Subtle, this Spring shit's cool, it's like a bunch of choruses, that's dope. But the Winter dude, where's Dose and Jel?"

And then there's this guy Jim Kaiser at Amoeba, a good friend of ours who plays a bicycle wheel. And his favorite thing, hands down, is the Winter session.

PFM: The flipside of that is, you get a lot of support from the Wire magazine.

D: Yes.

PFM: And the Wire runs reviews like, "Hey, it's 80 minutes of static!", and their readers will put up with anything.

D: "Put up with anything"-- that's an interesting way of...

PFM: I don't mean...

D: No, I know what you mean. Okay-- so what we do, whatever charm there is-- whatever worth there is in it to a third person-- one of the things about our music, is that it's been called egregious, or pretentious. We get these words that are mean compliments. You know what I mean? It gets a star for this, but it's not a good thing to have a star for.

What sometimes gives me an empty feeling is that I read these fucking descriptions of my writing and [they say it's] obsequious, and vague, and I just don't know what these people read-- do they think I'm on tabs of acid...What I remove from my writing is linear context. It's not really important to me, because it doesn't give me chills to see, "you flip the latch and the lock opens and then you can open the top of the chest and inside the chest is this." That doesn't give me chills, to think in that vein. So I've always kind of avoided it.

We make selfish music. The pace is dictated by us. If I want a breakdown here, I put a fucking breakdown here. I am not concerned about the 80 BMP consistency law of popular music. I'm concerned with other things, and they're very valid.

People have perceptions of our press and our acceptance in the press, and I have a very clear one. It's all The Wire. And then some magazines have known Sole and I since we were sending out our first 12"'s, like the XLR8R's-- we're sort of in the sea, but we're not picked. So it's interesting, what is it about the consistency of the palettes at The Wire, and is it experimental music, or is it just...?

I guess they're just open to all forms of music. And we only lay cleanly right now today across their palette, as being what we are and what we're worth. That's very curious to me. This is a point beyond which I cannot come back with answers.

We were a cult rap fetish, so if you were really into the dopest mainstream rappers in '95, then you kept looking, and Company Flow happened, and you got into that movement and you kept refining and trying to find the best rappers. And if you went all the way with it, you found us. So it was like Eminem, Slug, Buck, me, Sole, you know, and we went from that, having this sort of cult clutch rap thing, to our only safe bet being Wire readers. When we go play Sonar, it's like our fucking audience.

[Say] you have this guy at a record store counter, an indie record store counter, and a nice person comes in and says, "I want a record," and this guy looks behind himself, there are some new releases. He looks at the Anticon and he goes, "I love this shit, but I don't know if this guy will like this shit." But there's all these great records that you can safely recommend, whether it's Radiohead Kid A or Notwist's Neon Golden. Or Savath and Savalas, the first record, is fucking perfect, right? Or the Boards [of Canada] record. That may be the people we are in bed with, but we can't be recommended like that. We can't be recommended in the same handful.

PFM: You've got a business background, and I know you're involved in that side of that. So are there things you do to reach more of an audience, or are there things that you want to try?

D: Well, the music drives itself, right? The great thing about our music is it comes with a world. We are not part-time people, with respect to this music we create. We're completely full time to it. So when you get into it, you're gonna be overwhelmed, you're gonna be behind, there's gonna be catching up, there's gonna be all these gray areas you get to fill in. Which is why I love Weilheim shit, like I loved Notwist, and then I'm like, "Oh, there's Lali Puna..." And same thing with the Microphones, and same thing with Wu-Tang Clan. That's our aesthetic, that's our affinity.

So then the music becomes empowering. Even if it's not the music of a "revolution," per se, if you're not like a Palestinian rapping in Israel, you know what I mean-- like how else do you do it? It's a very curious path. I would have chosen none other, and I wasn't able to.

PFM: I was in San Francisco last November and saw the Subtle record release show, the one with Mike Patton and Kid 606...

D: Oh, the big one. Yeah.

PFM: ...And you guys have a very magnetic live show. You especially are definitely a frontman. I mean, you're not up there with backing tracks or just standing around looking at each other.

D: Or getting self-conscious and being like, "I can't do this one tonight!"

PFM: Yeah. You definitely put on a show.

D: Well, I love it. I'm at best on stage. It's one of the only places where I actually can feel like a million bucks, you know? It's a complex layer of confidence and no-confidence, multi-track recording in your bedroom. But being on stage, it's like, "Ooo-kay, now I remember why all this is going wrong or right!" It's very much my element.

I can deal with all the pangs of having to find money in 20 different places because you don't really reap the whirlwind with this cutting-edge music. But what does get me sometimes is where I go out and do all these shows, and want to have it be this great experience for all these people, but you have like four shows in a row that are like 50 people, and you're like "Oh my God." And then you go see someone with eight turntables, press play, and it's like 2,000 people.

I can't really figure out how you expand an audience legitimately? I think everyone's confused about it right now, whether you're a Ninja Tune or Warp...

PFM: How to expand your audience?

D: Yeah, and legitimately. Like how the fuck do you get records out? Press does what it does-- advertising, I don't know if that's worth ever doing. Only if you have this ad of like Jesus and George Bush having coitus, like this real photo. I don't know how much an 11 x 17 of your record cover is really going to do. All these things go moot at a point. So it's about word of mouth, and it's about all these things.

I've been writing a lot about just the aspects of luck and being picked, and how of course it's always how one perceives themselves in the world, as a bit of a scapegoat or a bit of a hero. Everyone generally has about a 60/40 split that volleys, between those two.

PFM: You have a distinct sound and a distinct style-- do you get people out of blue, or from Hollywood, saying they want to use you for something?

D: I think it will be one of the-- like when I met Mike Patton, I was like, "Oh man, I want to be like this dude." You can tell he just has that energy, right? Like, I don't know, the owner of Nabisco wants Mike Patton to sing at his wedding-- I don't know, whatever it is. You can tell, I'm sure he has a million and one stories. You can just feel it off him. And we're accruing a bit of that energy.

I just finished doing this movie, we're going to master it today, and I did all the voice for this pair of cartoon eyes. It's an independent movie. The guys who did the special effects for Hellboy did all the CG for it, and it's called the Zoo Project. It's hard to explain. It's an art flick. And you know, those kind of things all create just the kind of gumption that I want to my work, that it was where my blood took me, and my days and my meaningful experiences with nice people, you know what I mean?

PFM: But you're not tempted to do a pizza ad for $50k.

D: No, see, here's the thing. With Subtle, we just signed a publishing deal with Warp, and so that shit is about to hit the fan. So I sat everyone down-- because with cLOUDDEAD, we were all very, very introverted at the time, and a lot of the success brought a lot of talks that sucked for us. Like, heading towards realities that compromised our ideal reality, blah blah blah. Splitting royalties, the prospect of [rights] getting bought later so you have to talk about how you would break it up now. These things really gave us deep pangs, just because we were way too sensitive, maybe in the wrong and right ways, who knows. Like, if you have a buy-out clause, you have to talk about a realistic plan and assume you all hate each other-- I mean cLOUDDEAD did break up, ironically-- but [in case] things go bad, and things have to get split. It's all very curious.

But anyway, that is all just to say that before we got into the publishing thing with Subtle I was like, "All right guys, let's sit down and have a talk." My rule in any group is, it's split with the members. So Subtle is six ways. Doesn't matter if it all becomes a capella, people in it split it. Any other way creates fucking dissension and uncomfortable shit that you can't recover from. You can't be like, "Yeah, me and this band used to work three ways, until we started respecting these two, now it's five." It's just tough-- it's not so much a different relationship, but it is a different treatment of the same exact relationship's potential.

But anyway, so you got six people in a band, the only way to make money in a band like that is to get $60,000. Now I'd love to sign a contract for the soundtracks to every Wes Anderson movie, you know what I'm saying? Things like that, I have no spots on my conscience about. But then you get shit like the Gap. Or you know, there's a grey line between McDonald's and cars. My step-mom is hard-nosed; she doesn't like art at all. She's a brilliant woman but she has no time for my aesthetic qualms. She's like, "If McDonald's offers you a million dollars, are you going to take it?" I'm sitting there thinking about it, and she's like, "You're a fucking idiot!"

[But] what do you do with $2 million? Where did it come from? These things are curious to me. I don't know how I would decide. Now, $2 million today, I don't have anything to spend it on. Maybe I'll say no.

However, if, let's say, "I heart L.A.," where I'm talking about the moles on my penis remind me of skulls-- dude, if I heard that on a car commercial? I would pay. I would pay a hundred grand to have that in the popular media. I don't think that'll really happen, I'm sure that if Subtle does make it big in the publishing world it will be for the instrumental versions of our popular songs, or not so popular songs. But nonetheless, the idea, the prospect of that, I'd say yes in a fucking second. With my words? If they use anything with my words, it's gonna be clashing or frightfully suggestive in an opposite direction, which delights me.

PFM: A lot of the people you work with have been your close friends.

D: Oh, hell yeah.

PFM: And you've said that cLOUDDEAD broke up because you were close friends. So is that something that you'll continue with?

D: Well, here's the thing-- and this is how Anticon started, because I spent 10 minutes listening to a Sole song, that was four minutes long, and I spent 10 minutes meeting him, and I was like, "This is the same motherfucker. Holy shit. He's where he is, and it's the same thing." For whatever reason, I listen to Neon Golden, I listen to Hood, and I'm like, "I think I'm crazy! I think these are the same motherfuckers too!" Boards of Canada...the same motherfuckerness.

You know, whether it's just the career path of doing independent music, being an artist, however you want to pigeon-hole it, it creates a certain type of character, it creates a certain fit that they have with the world? And when you meet those people you fit, and you click, and it's undeniable. So meeting Markus of Notwist, it was instantaneous. And Chris and Richard from Hood, and all these guys that we've met that are not underground rappers, and Hrvatski. Mike Patton. I'm just like, damn. When I met Mike Patton I was like, "Oh wow"-- it seems we even annoy and delight the people around us the same way, almost.

So the privilege of that is that you know these people, and you know this music, and for what it's worth to me in my head-- it's a non-monetary kudo-- but it's meeting a little superhero that has these powers over you and their music and their world and all of their space. And that's what I really thrive off of.

So what that means toward your question, which I got far from, is if they're friends-- I mean it was proven over the course of the first 13 & God record to me, to he and I, that we are as close as we thought we could be, him being German, me being New Jerseyan. So it's great. So these things totally equate, meeting Mike Patton, there was no fucking flack, it was just like, instantly, "Oh wow. If we had more time, we could totally share a plane. Or we do already."

But as far as working with unfriends, I don't think that would ever happen. The reason I can do what I do on stage with those people is because I couldn't fake it. We have comfort.

PFM: You were a battle rapper, and you've said you think your style is aggressive, like on The No Music. But one of the things I like, and this is more of a Circle thing, is that it's almost subliminal. And you're talking about being in this comfort zone, as opposed to in the past, where you're up there facing off against people.

D: Well, when your blood is thick and you're young like that, being aggressive and trying to be flashy, they sort of occur to you so often that you can't get past 'em that often. Some people are born with all this presence of mind, like Why? is like that, I met him at 18 and he was 40. He was always like, "Slow down, Adam!" But for me, those were the initial pulls.

And when I first started battling, I didn't really have shit to back up. You know, I was 18, man-- [Raps] "Hey! I'll never dishwash again!" I don't really know-- "And I'll never take/ Managerial accounting twice." There wasn't much to me at that point, except I could definitely go out and send. The rapper being this island unto himself, I fucking loved that, man. As soon as I turned 15 I was like, "Shit, this is great. I really see myself this way. It'd be great if I could rap, add a little story to it."

I mean it's wild man, being who I was-- because you know I'm in a battle with Eminem, and then he goes on and he becomes the Michael Jackson of the 1990s.

PFM: You guys both lost, right?

D: Yeah, we both lost. It was a really corny thing. We took each other in because we were both battling Juice and Rhymefest, who were kicking a lot of written shit. It was very bad, it smelled like fish, you know. I was like, "These guys suck, they're cheating." So I served Rhymefest really bad. I was saying his words before he said 'em. It was really fun man, I ate him up. And then Eminem and Juice had a great battle, it was fuckin', it was fabulous, you know, either one could have won. In my opinion if the underdog puts the champ down, the underdog should win. But the world will always have the champ winning. It doesn't go any other way. You want the champ to come back, who cares about the underdog, he'll definitely be there next year, you know what I mean?

So that whole energy's going on, and then they let Rhymefest back in because he said I was talking over him, but I was saying his raps? I was like, "Oh, okay, I guess that's talking." So they let him back in and then they try to have me battle Eminem when I should've been in the finals, and they said that those two tied. So then I battled Eminem and I was dissing the Scribblejam in my 30 seconds, and he said I look like "a whack Marky Mark with dark hair," I think. It was really lame. There was no air in our balloons when we went against each other. We were just like, "This is bullshit, we're getting jerked."

A lot of his shit was written. And that was the time when I was gluing people together, and I was like, "Oh, I want Labtekwon to meet Radioinactive, and I want Sole and then this and that." And when he didn't pass the freestyle battle rap test, I threw his card away. And then I was recording the Them record and I looked in The Source and he was an unsigned hype, and I was like, "Oh, it's Eminem!" And then next thing you know, pow.

I wonder a lot about making things meaningful. You want to do meaningful work and make art, but you're making records, which is good, but you don't want to weight them-- it's a very curious thing. It's a very commodified art form, which is a good and bad thing, because it really simplifies it. It's cool that you can just hand a movie to someone on a DVD-R and they can have a whole movie on this fucking plastic-- same thing with a record, a whole world on a piece of shit. That's amazing.

PFM: I love that. I have dreams about going to record stores. Some people have dreams about travelling, and I have dreams about going to record stores and finding new stuff.

D: Oh, that's great. I dream in solid B-movie. It's like I am the hero, and there are aliens with a virus, and it's infecting everyone in a housing tenement, and I have to get everyone out, and there's a robot with a treasure map, and a cure. It's so bad man. Every night. Sometimes I love it, sometimes it doesn't let me rest. It's always been that way, since I've been a kid.

Except sometimes I'm at the merch booth now. I swear to God dude, I kid you not, I'll be at the fucking merch booth. It's the one recurring theme in the dreams. And the other one I have, right before I go on tour all the time, is that I'm all of a sudden, noone told us, but the first show on our tour is now.

PFM: Well, it's the high school dream. And a lot of people don't move past the high school dream, so you've matured.

D: I know, I know! Now I've changed all the variables in the high school dream, so instead of not studying, I don't have my AC/DC adapter for my keyboard. And I'm like, "Oh fuck man," and everybody's the way they are in the band. I'll be like, "Dax, can I borrow yours?" And he'll be like, "No."